Linsanity spreads to motherboard market

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. ASRock has become the first company in the PC industry to hop on the Linsanity bandwagon—and it’s pretty much the epic fail you’d expect. The problem begins with the press release, which touts the "Lincredible" miracle of ASRock’s latest BIOS and driver update for its budget H61 motherboards. This update adds support for Intel’s Rapid Start and Smart Connect. The former speeds waking up from sleep states, while the latter allows email and social networking apps to update while the PC is slumbering.

I know what you’re thinking: that doesn’t sound nearly as incredible as the story of Jeremy Lin, the Asian-American who, after going undrafted out of Harward and being cut by two NBA teams, has become a superstar point guard for the New York Knicks. But there’s more. ASRock’s BIOS update adds support for next-gen Ivy Bridge CPUs, which is nice, and the ability to push the memory clock to 2200MHz, which just seems silly. Keep in mind that we’re talking about motherboards based on the H61 chipset, the ugly stepchild of Intel’s 6-series lineup. The H61 doesn’t support multiplier-based CPU overclocking, is limited to one DIMM per memory channel, lacks 6Gbps SATA support, and has fewer PCIe lanes and USB ports than the H67, P67, and Z68 chipsets. Putting 2200MHz memory in an H61 mobo makes about as much sense as slapping Fatal1ty’s name on an X79 board—oh, wait.

What bugs me most about the press release is the fact that it hit our inbox this morning, which suggests the folks at ASRock aren’t paying much that attention to Lin’s exploits on the court. Apparently, no one saw the game last night. In a loss to the Heat, Lin was stifled by defenders and shot just 1-for-11 from the field. He had only three assists, and worse, a whopping eight turnovers. If you’re going to play off the hype, you don’t do it the morning after a performance like that.

Amazing. Not a mention of Jeremy Lin’s religious beliefs or his unashamed evangelical promotion “godly basketball”. Of course this is a big deal. The unheeding silence on this meme is preposterous.

Obviously, given the excellence of his erratic yet incredible success, Lin’s emergence as aspirational symbol to a hundred million oppressed yet faithful and prosperous Chinese Christians everywhere should not be surprising. Students of marketing know that an aspirational narrative is as good a marketing theme as a proselytizing one. For the NBA and Greater China, Linsanity might well be the miracle as endorsed by ASRock’s faithful management.

As well as an age-old story. The Championed walk in accomplishment and acclaim, claim the glory for the name of the Judeo-Christian God, then watch as a dismissive wave of public disbelief and derision follows like clockwork. This majority response is predictable, was predicted. Not only in the overwrought writings of the early church, but also in enemy attestation.

ronch

8 years ago

Lincredibly Lame.

jackbomb

8 years ago

But it can’t even run two video cards lin SLI.

cynan

8 years ago

Captain Obvious asks: “What does basketball have to do with PC components”?

While tenuous at times, at least there [i

ecalmosthuman

8 years ago

Hahahaha! Oh mannn do I see what you did there.

Meadows

8 years ago

Problem is, I have no idea what “Linsanity” is, but I gathered some facts based on the comments found here, yet I still fail to give [i

Stargazer

8 years ago

It’s around 3.74 millidamn for me.

BobbinThreadbare

8 years ago

Enough of one to comment

sschaem

8 years ago

All this marketing is for the Chinese market that doesn’t translate to this culture.

The NBA want to keep basketball as THE #1 sport in china, for obvious reasons, and anyone grab on for the ride.

Rageypoo

8 years ago

So do we make fun of the boards height or ethnicity, or do we makes fun of lin’s lack of x multiplier or memory channels?

ew

8 years ago

How do you pronounce ASRock? I propose that it be pronounced “ass rock”.

SoM

8 years ago

more like hemorrhoid

NeelyCam

8 years ago

It’s already pronounced like that. I know I’ve called it that for years..

Arclight

8 years ago

Me 2, but now that i think about it (i don’t do that often – think about-) it’s really correct. It’s more like as rock (as in “like a rock”). The difference between as rock and ass rock being that i end the first as with a slight z, unlike the secound pronounciation.

I think we need to call the Jew Hunter and teach us proper enounciation.

NeelyCam

8 years ago

Harvard is spelled with a ‘v’

UberGerbil

8 years ago

But pronounced without an ‘r’

ludi

8 years ago

Pahk thuh cah in thuh Hah-vahd yahd…

willmore

8 years ago

I spent 6 years in NJ and I still can’t bring myself to pronounce the capital of the state without a ‘t’ in the middle. They did make me say ‘soda’ reflexively.

BiffStroganoffsky

8 years ago

Phonetic eastcoast/Jewish moment?

Rza79

8 years ago

[quote

JMccovery

8 years ago

This is more or less semantics… LGA1155 has only two memory channels which on this board, each memory slot is connected to a single channel, meaning that the board is limited to one DIMM per memory channel; 2 DIMM slots, 2 memory channels, 1 Double-sided/Single-sided DIMM per channel.

ASRock has a couple of H61 boards with 4 dimm slots. If you can keep it to single-channel DIMMs, you can have all 4 populated. If you can’t, you start losing memory.

Rza79

8 years ago

Fixed the quote thingy but what you’re saying doesn’t hold true in reality.
Intel imposed a restriction on H61 boards to the amount of memory they can support. This restriction is unrelated to the cpu memory controller obviously since that doesn’t change. I was just correction Geoff’s error. It’s not a one DIMM per channel restriction as I stated.
As derFunkenstein says, there are H61 boards out there with 4 DIMM slots. You can fill them with single sided DIMMs (not single channel DIMMs derFunkenstein).

Anarchist

8 years ago

anything for few bucks …

dpaus

8 years ago

[PrincessBride] Linconceivable!! [/PrincessBride]

derFunkenstein

8 years ago

yeah, clearly they had a Lingenious idea here.

LoneWolf15

8 years ago

Over there! The Cliffs of Linsanity!!

WillBach

8 years ago

You see, it’s to head of crap like this that Lin filled for a trademark on “Lincredible”

CuttinHobo

8 years ago

How long until Apple hires Jeremy Lin and then sues the pants off of Linus Torvalds?

UberGerbil

8 years ago

It is for precisely this reason Linus generally doesn’t wear pants.

dpaus

8 years ago

We usually get such personal details from ssk or even NeelyCam.

derFunkenstein

8 years ago

The Knicks are like a sub-.500 team, right?

Yeats

8 years ago

Yup, 17-18. With Jeremy Lin starting they are something like 9-3, though.

derFunkenstein

8 years ago

I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’ll regress toward his mean pretty shortly. Last night might have been the first step.

Yeats

8 years ago

That’s the fun part… the sample size is so small that we don’t know what Lin’s mean is. Hard to believe he could have a long career as a point guard while averaging 6 TO’s per game.

entropy13

8 years ago

That’s what I was cautioning several basketball fans. Yet somehow I’m a “hater.” Then I mention some unknown rookie who made the consecutive hits record for the NY Yankees iirc and then somehow vanished to obscurity after achieving such a feat that even the most expensive player ever in baseball history can’t even approach in doing.

ludi

8 years ago

That’s a fine selection of Lintel products.

Helmore

8 years ago

When I read the title of this post I couldn’t figure out what ‘Linsanity’ meant, so I presumed it had something to do with Linux…..

Never heard of the name Jeremy Lin BTW, but I’m from Europe….

stdRaichu

8 years ago

Likewise. There’s an explanation of “linsanity” on wikipedia but it doesn’t seem to make a whole bunch of sense, and doesn’t seem to have any bearing on computers (he’s a basketball player).

Anyone care to explain?

Yeats

8 years ago

Jeremy Lin is an NBA player of Taiwanese descent who was a great player at Harvard, but because of his ethnicity and the fact that he played against inferior competition while at University hardly anyone thought he could be a meaningful player in the NBA. Lin basically “came out of nowhere” to help the New York Knicks become a good, exciting team, averaging over 20 points per game. All of this excitement associated with Lin – his ethnicity, his schooling, the fact that this is taking place in New York City – has led to “Linsanity”, a portmanteau of “Lin” and “insanity”.

Linsanity has nothing to do with computers, but has created a tremendous amount of buzz throughout the USA and Asia.

UberGerbil

8 years ago

Lin’s family is from Taiwan, which automatically makes him not only the currently-most-famous Taiwanese-descended person, but also the only Taiwanese-descended person most Americans could name (without realizing it, in most cases, since to most Americans he’s just “Asian” or perhaps “Chinese”).

Meanwhile, many of the big computer component and motherboard companies — including ASRock — are headquartered in Taiwan. Lin is huge, huge news over there. It may not have occurred to them that he isn’t such a big deal in all their target markets / demographics.

Stargazer

8 years ago

What, Jen-Hsun Huang isn’t a household name in the US? 🙂

Seriously though, I’d expect a lot of people to know of Lucy Liu and Ang Lee…

Yeats

8 years ago

I don’t know who Lucy Liu is, but I know Ang Lee.

Stargazer

8 years ago

She was in the fantastic (for some weird usage of “fantastic”) movie Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

Come to think of it, she was probably better known about a decade or so ago…

indeego

8 years ago

She wasn’t in the joy luck club. I am disappoint.

UberGerbil

8 years ago

When either one of them makes another hit movie, that may be true (again). But fame is mostly fleeting (and Lin is likely no exception).

burntham77

8 years ago

Nothing to worry about.

ColeLT1

8 years ago

American here, who has never heard of him.

NeelyCam

8 years ago

I had heard the name but didn’t know what the buzz was about until I saw an article in The Week.

Doesn’t matter. Hockey > basketball.

jstern

8 years ago

Basically he was an drafted D-League player (Developmental league, very low quality), who while in the NBA was cut 2 times, and was about to be cut from his current team, the New York Knicks, until some injuries, and a couple of other things forced the coach to play him some minutes, and then he went on a tare, putting up super star numbers, and just winning. It was an incredible story, that made the daily national news. His last name is Lin, so basically, everything that rhymes with Lin, people have been changing those words… for example, instead of using the word win, people say lin. Like, “All I do is lin, lin, lin.” Or I saw a sign in a game that said, “Jeremmy I want you… “heart” linside of me.

You will get the idea from this page on [url

entropy13

8 years ago

He was an undrafted player. Went to training camp to the only team that invited him, the Dallas Mavericks. GM Nelson offered him a one-year contract, he declined (he’s therefore not an NBA champ lol). While he accepted the two-year contract offer from Golden State (since he’s from Oakland), but the second year isn’t guaranteed. After last season, he was released by the Warriors. He also spent some time in the D-League. So basically there wasn’t really any difference between the Mavericks and Warriors offer.

Then he went to the Rockets while he was playing in his second season in the D-League, but they didn’t extend his 10-day contract. The Knicks therefore picked him up.

juampa_valve_rde

8 years ago

I tought that they may have added linpack to the uefi suite :s

ASRock, NBA gives a sh!t to most people outside USA.

Try Messinsanity or Extreme CR7, soccer (football actually) is more popular worldwide!

Yeats

8 years ago

NBA is huge in China, and the NBA caters to that market. Basketball is pretty much on par with soccer (football) there. So if you compare the worldwide scope of basketball vs soccer, there may be more basketball fans who purchase computer hardware than soccer fans.